Fair Use Note

WARNING for European visitors: European Union laws require you to give European Union visitors information about cookies used on your blog. In many cases, these laws also require you to obtain consent. As a courtesy, we have added a notice on your blog to explain Google's use of certain Blogger and Google cookies, including use of Google Analytics and AdSense cookies. You are responsible for confirming this notice actually works for your blog, and that it displays. If you employ other cookies, for example by adding third party features, this notice may not work for you. Learn more about this notice and your responsibilities.

Friday, November 30, 2012

30 November - MSM

The video below, Confessions of a Wal-Mart Hit Man, features a former
general manager for the company speaking of the ways managers cheated
workers out of wages they had earned, rigged a vote against a union in
the company's Annapolis, Md., store, and how hard it was to eat in the
staff lunchroom, where workers took their breaks with no food, because
they couldn't afford to buy lunch. The video is a bonus scene from
Robert Greenwald's documentary: Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. link

These anti-Wal-Mart
actions are far bigger -- and far more important -- than many of us
realize. To strike against Wal-Mart is to strike not against one company
but against the entire One Percent business model: absolute power and
unlimited profit for the executives, total subjugation and bottomless
poverty for all the rest of us. Such strikes are therefore revolutionary
by definition -- hence deserving of our maximum support.

At the rally—surely the largest in Elwood history—workers told of
backbreaking work for little pay, temperatures that oscillate between
sweltering heat and bitter cold, management retaliation, and gender
discrimination.
Yolanda Dickerson, who had worked in a warehouse for two years, says
she “was sexually harassed on a regular basis,” recounting an incident
of being locked in a trailer by male co-workers. After Dickerson
reported the incident, she says management did nothing. WWJ says such
reports are common.
Daniel Meadows, a striker who had been at the warehouse since January
and in the industry for six years, felt similarly. As the crowd marched
toward the warehouse gates, he explained the work’s effects.
“You literally can’t do anything after a shift,” he said, describing
his work unloading 270-pound grills from trucks alone, by hand. “You’re
so exhausted. In the summer, you’re soaked in sweat. In the winter,
you’re freezing. You constantly have bruised shins,” from heavy carts
with no brakes slamming into workers’ legs.
When the march arrived at the locked warehouse gates—usually the site
of a constant stream of semis entering and leaving—community leaders
and pastors in clerical collars and stoles sat down in the street in
front of the silent warehouse. Two dozen police, clad in full riot gear
from head to toe, preparing to move in to make the arrests.
Even more jarring, a black Humvee was idling behind them, equipped with what appeared to be a Long-Range Acoustic Device,
a sonic weapon for crowd control. Military-grade policing equipment and
cops who appeared prepared for hand-to-hand streetfighting were being
used to clear the street of pastors and community leaders softly singing
“We Shall Overcome.”
As police prepared to make the arrests, strikers pointed at riot
officers’ legs and started a chant referencing the common warehouse
problem of constantly bruised shins. “You’ve got shinguards! We want
shinguards!” they chanted.
One by one, the 17 were handcuffed and taken away. They were released several hours later with misdemeanor citations.
Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ), a United Electrical Workers union
(UE) affiliate, says brutal working conditions, wage theft, and
management retaliation against organizing workers are rampant—and the
big-box companies like Walmart who are supplied by these warehouses use
the complicated layers of subcontracting to avoid responsibility for
working conditions.

Search This Blog

Translate

Microsoft Translate

opit or oldephartte's shared items

About Me

I've been 'around' for a few years now, pursuing the shifting goal of a sharable home-made surfers resource site focused on ease of use and variety of mostly adult ( whoa : I didn't say prurient ) content.